Today, the GNOME Project celebrates the release of GNOME 2.14, the latest version of the popular, multi-platform Free desktop environment. Foresight Linux 0.9.4 was first to incorporate GNOME 2.14 on their distribution, VMWare and Qemu images are already available in addition to their normal distribution.

I tried Foresight Linux 0.9.4 on VMWare player a few hours ago, I found 15 bugs in about 30 minutes. I sent some of them to one of their devs. Too bad that their metacity pref panel was old (the minimize-on-double-click option was not available) and there was no Ekiga in it (among other, more real bugs like the freeze of Gnomebaker and Banshee). Overall though, a nice looking desktop.

This is the best release of gnome I have ever used, dual screen no longer causes a plethora of crashes on the window list, and panel, the speed improvements are actually THERE, and make a huge different in day to day work. plus the desktop just looks appealing.. they hit a homerun with this release, and I hope instead of listening to the OMG GNOME IS FAR BEHIND KDE, they will ignore and keep up with the improvements they made this time, and keep squashing bugs. features can come into 3.0 and shouldent take away from the polish the 2.x series has begain to gain.

No one said anything about breaking backward compatibility for the move from GNOME 2.x to 3.x. Actually, one of the goals IIRC is to not break backward compatibility because it was such a hassle the last time around. So 3.0 may see the rethinking of some desktop metaphors and so on, but apps should continue working regardless.

Because I am not a Foresight user, I don't really care about it. I just downloaded and tried it this morning because I had nothing better to do. However, I did email one of the developers with a small list (not all problems were listed there) just to let him know. That's how far I am willing to go with it (no more bugzilla accounts please, I am drown in them).

And btw, no, you might not ask why. It would be off topic. If you really wanted the above answer, you should have email me in person.

I like GNOME, and use it quite often (either GNOME or XFCE). One thing that has bugged me about GNOME is that there is no easy way to change the color of the desktop fonts. By default they are white with a bit of shading. What if you want to use a white background? How do you make the fonts dark? I know there is a hacky way to do it with gconf or something but c'mon, that should be a simple preference setting somewhere.

You can't set any colors yet (aside from panel background), so where would you put this setting? Then what would you do with the shadows if for example you set the text to black? Automatically figure out when to use a shadow and when not? It's not so simple at all. Do XP and OSX allow you to change the desktop font color and how do they handle it?

At least the current default should work fine in most cases (with the only exception being white or almost-white wallpapers and even then you can still read the text...).

No need to get defensive. I said I _like_ GNOME and use it along with XFCE. Where would this preference go? Well, either the Font preferences panel or the Desktop Background preferences panel, for starters. And for the shadow -- couldn't you have a checkbox or something? It's not _that_ complicated. Anyway, that is one of the few KDE features that I would like to see in GNOME.

It wasn't intended to sound defensive, just asking serious questions. With a shadow checkbox you are already at two preferences, for a really small detail. The issue isn't that those two options would make a huge difference, but where do you draw the line? Once you start adding micromanagment preferences like this, it becomes harder to justify not adding preferences for every other tiny detail. That's why restraint is important, even if it isn't always easy. Otherwise we'd end up with GNOME 1.x (I know that not everybody would be sad about that).

I think this would probably fit well into some kind of power user tweak UI tool though.

because there are no packages for Arch yet (guess I'm too lazy to make some an my own ;/), but I don't mind, as my interests lie in the new gedit and epiphany. Apart from those two I'll stick to xfce, although checking how the new gnome will perform is an open option.

Anyway, the most interesting thing that I find about Gnome these days is the way it is organized and marketed. Dyavyd's feature preview (and same for gedit and epiphany) really functions well as an appetizer, indulging a potential user into the world of gnome. Kde lacks such thing (well, there was something like that for 3.5 afair, but far less impressive). If I'm wrong, then please correct me.

KDE is taking the Apple approach with KDE4 ....we're not telling what it is, but it's gonna be really cool" lol

anyway, i'll be totally honest, i'm not big on gnome but this seems to be a nice release, perhaps 2.14.1 will be a little more bug free.

It seems every time i test Gnome i like it a little more, the problem is that is that every time i think i might give gnome a long term (few weeks) execlusive run it seems kde comes out with a new one or has just come out with a new one and i run that. I love KDE but i swear, i will give Gnome a fair shot sometime soon, i just need to commit to a few weeks with no kde.

While I am a big fan (and kinda contributor) of Gnome and was looking forward for this release I have to say I am slightly dissappointed with it. Most improvements they mention on release notes seems to work half the way, and many of them were not so needed (dialog redesigns etc.)

Using dapper here and I cannot see the speed improvements. Gedit opens a text file in freaking 2 seconds while on my win. box it's instant. It now can open and save remote files but guess what, it displays my username and password I used to access my sbm share on title bar

Firefox is again very slow at tab switching and moving/resizing windows is still a pain. You cannot grab the window or their corner easily. Gnome theme selector crashes everytime after selecting a new theme. Bug buddy does not even help, it asks too many questions, and hell where is "gnome theme selector" in that apps selection when reporting a bug?

Release notes say that yelp is improved, but for god's sake, try searching for "ls" and make a note how many results you get and where actually is the manual page for "ls" command you're actually looking for.

Allright, screw searching, go to Help Topics and try to find manual page for "ls" command that way. After freaking 3 clicks (Command Line Help>Manual Pages>Applications) I am lost and don't know where to find, lots of text to scroll. Learn from konqueror, man:ls in address bar and that's all you have to do.

While the look of gnome desktop rocks it does not help with the general problems it always had and continues to have. The above are the bugs/annoyances I noticed after playing with latest Gnome for only 30-40 minutes. Oh, one more, when number lock is on, I cannot type /*-+ symbols that are on my number pad. I guess this one is OS related actually. The list goes on and on unfortunately...

Foresight is not the only distro that has the latest GNOME -- it's also in Frugalware. Frugalware also has the newest LyX that I haven't seen yet in other distros. Getting ready-compiled packages is great for us lazy people and if you're interested in fresh stuff, then Frugalware must be one of the best distros out there.

This is truely awesome for google search, lauching apps, browser history(Very useful) and many more great search features.

I'd just like that say what a cracking release this is, loads of hard work on optimization. 2.16 will be even fast as they are working on gnome startup even more as we speak, Federico and others have knocked off 6 seconds already, just fantatic work all round.

Anyone has a How-To? I cannot wait till Dapper. And I want to do a clean clean install of the official Dapper release. I have not the time for that yet (nor is possible as of now), but I want Gnome 2.14 now . Thanks.

* 3rd party repositories are not synced up to it so if you're using anything outside of main/restricted/universe there's a good chance that it won't be available for Dapper

It's generally not recommended unless you want to help out on the testing and don't mind the rough edges.

Otherwise, waiting (a month or so isn't that bad, is it?) or using something like Garnome might be a better choice:
. http://www.gnome.org/projects/garnome/
Garnome allows you to build GNOME in your own home directory so it doesn't interfere with your main Breezy installation. When Dapper comes around or if things go south with GARGNOME, you can just delete the GARNOME install and go back to the standard GNOME.

I used to use it back while I was in Fedora and it works great. The key problem with it is that it takes *a long* time to compile and download everything. But if Dapper is too bleeding edge and you're itching to use GNOME 2.14, it might be your best choice.

Well.. this is just me complaining... BUT, gedit stops reading .lang files after a certain point. I tried to impliment a lisp.lang file that covered the whole language, but it stoped highlighting halfway through the file and that was just after I had included all the functions, I had not gotten to the other symbols yet.

All in all I like GNOME very much and I'm looking forward to see this new version in Debian unstable (actualy using Gnome 2.12.3). One thing I don't like that much is the icon size in the toolbars. It takes way too much space (50px in Nautilus) on my screen (notebook 15" XGA (1024x768)) compared to 31px in Firefox - well I know, those are not the same apps. Is there a possibility to reduce the size of the icons, or toolbars? The same thing is with the location bar. IMO it is a little bit a waste of useful (content) space.

But kudos to the devs! GNOME is a nice environment (with its strength and weakness) and with every release it gets better and better.

Thanks, but I've done this already, but the toolbars are still too high. It seems, I have to wait until I buy a new notebook with higher resolution (15"@1400x1050 or 15.4"@1680x1050) then the problem will be gone. It's a pity, that this ain't be possible to choose the icon/toolbar size like in mozilla firefox or thunderbird :-(